You're close, he pushes, friendly. They graduate you?

Yup. I got bunked with you unless you don't want me. Where are you at? This place is a maze.

Gimme eyes?

She has to bird-bird-bird much harder to do anything but talk, but she can.

As soon as she's sent enough visuals to identify her surroundings, he pushes back a complete walkthrough of the path to his room.

She relaxes the birding and follows the directions. Here I am, she says, and she also knocks for the benefit of any recording equipment.

"Hey, Sue. How's Tactical treating you? It's lucky you're going by a girls' name, I got the guy to say I could bunk with you before he realized who I was talking about."

"I got my save file, so that's safe. Desks here won't have it, but maybe someday I can start it up again. I'll probably be homesick for it after more than a shuttle voyage has gone by without. I guess I'll get more reading done, unless there's massively more homework here - are they still putting up with you not turning up to classes? Is there anything besides classes at this level? I doubt they have a battleroom." She stretches up on her tiptoes, touches the ceiling. "Low grav, though, is there anyplace with zero-g to fly in?"

"I'm learning everything they want me to learn," he shrugs. "And I show up to tests. Yeah, you can use the docking bays, it's not official but it's fun."

"Not official like you get in trouble if they catch you or not official like they don't have assigned times or anything?"

"No assigned times," he says. "It was my personal combat instructor who showed me how to get in in the first place."

"I wonder if I should start taking that. I took like six classes of it when I was seven but I've forgotten a lot of it and I'm not literally super-fast like I would be if my mutation were directly for that, I can just control myself at top normal-human speed, so I probably shouldn't trundle along expecting that to do the trick all the time."

"I can introduce you if you want," he offers cheerfully.

"Do you suppose they'll put us in the same level class?" asks Aegis.

"If you belong there," he says with a grin.

"Trained or not I bet I'm better than you," she says, putting up her hands and throwing a mini-strike at the air in front of her. "Is the room free, could we put on padding and have a looksee?"

"Lead the way," she grins.

Aegis slides naturally from low-grav to high-grav walking styles, going from a light dancing gait to a rolling one, and she spins a couple times en route, taking in her surroundings. "What styles are you doing?" she asks.

"Little of everything," he shrugs.

Sue raids the selection like he's done it a hundred times before, which he probably has.

Eventually Aegis is all decked out. "You want to take offense, or you just want me to start beating you up unprovoked?"

Aegis only took classes so she could be sure she wasn't making amateur mistakes. She didn't take it so she could learn to do anything in particular. Her style is nothing like anything - it's the pace of frenetic battleroom flight with the precision of a surgeon and the spontaneous last-minute decisionmaking of a housefly surprised by air currents. This is heavy gravity, so her advantage isn't unsurpassable the way it is when literally nothing holds her back - but she is fast, and she goes exactly where she means to go.

Finally, Aegis gets him: she rolls up off the floor, catches his neck between her ankles and slams him down with one of his arms under him, the other caught in her hand, his legs twisted up under most of her weight. When he can't throw her off, she grins; the angle is such that he can just barely see this. "Gotcha."

She lets him up when he yields, rolling off him and springing up again. "But it's pretty close, they'll probably sort me into your level."

Aegis turns around, beholds an adult, salutes, and says, "Sir."

"Pleased to meet you. I'm Isabella Swan, or Aegis, and I just shuttled here from Battle School."

"You're badly trained and you just wiped the floor with my best student," says Howlett. "You should take my class."

"I plan to, sir. I can do this because I'm wearing an exoskeleton." She holds up her hands, netted with copper threads.

"I noticed," Howlett says dryly.

Aegis puts her hands behind her back. "But, it only does so much, so yes, I was planning on taking a personal combat course and we were just trying to guess if I'd be in Sue's or another level."

"And now you know," he says.

Aegis nods. "Er, do you need this room now or something, sir?"

"Nope." He smiles dryly. "Why, do you?"

"Not anymore. I'm just wondering what you're doing here, sir."

"Watching you kick his ass," he says with a nod to Sue, who grins.

"We could do it again," she says. "See if it was a fluke or not, sir. Or maybe we shouldn't so you can cure me of bad habits before I cement them."

"Yessir. Is there a sign-up sheet somewhere here or do I register through the computer system?"

"Through the computers," says Sue. "I can help if you want."

"Sure." Aegis takes off her padding and puts her shoes back on.

"Good teacher?"

"Yeah!"

"I bet you actually show up to this one instead of just doing the assigned reading and showing up for tests, too."

"Of course," he giggles.

Aegis twirls and skips back out into the halls. "Anything else I should see before the settling-in-getting-lost-meeting-up-with-old-friends period is up and I get my orders?"

"Well, I could go show you how to get into the docking bays," he offers.

"Oh, yes, please, the entire shuttle had gravity, it was stifling."

Sue laughs, and leads her away.

Aegis makes sure she hasn't lost any of her flight skills in the time away from a place to dance. This isn't exactly a battleroom - the obstacles are different - but there is enough open air and enough handholds to get in some good flying.

Sue makes short, controlled hops from improvised handhold to improvised handhold and finds a good spot to admire her while she flies.

"They never, like," Aegis says, tumbling past him, "suddenly turn on gravity here or anything?"

"Nope!" says Sue.

"Awesome. What kind of schedule am I looking at, or didn't you read yours before you tossed it?"

"Pffff," says Sue.

"Well, how many tests do you have in the average month," she tries, snickering.

"I dunno, one or two?" he says. "I don't really track time like that."

"You don't? How do you track it?"

"In the short term," he says. "I know what time it is, and when my next personal combat class and my next test are, and when they're serving lunch."

"Huh." She hooks her foot around a handhold, changes direction, kicks off, bounces. "Is there any battleroom-equivalent here, even? Or is it all classes and meals and blocks of free time?"

"Nah, that's pretty much it," he says. "That and warship tours."

"Warship tours? That sounds maybe interesting."

"They're fun!"

"I don't suppose you get to try piloting them anywhere."

He laughs. "Nope."

"Pity. What've you been doing in your spare time, without the game - just flying and driving away roommates?"

"Pretty much."

"Gonna drive me away too? Steal my socks and play music loud at night?"

He snorts. "Yep. By the time I graduate, there won't be a student in Tactical who hasn't transferred out of my room."

"What have you been doing?"

"Being me," he says lightly. "Not many people can handle it."

"Well, I asked for you. Maybe I'll stay," she laughs, and she pirouettes through the air.

"You can handle me if anybody can," laughs Sue.

"But I mean did they cite specific objectionable habits or did the teachers actually move them on the grounds that you were being Sue at them?"

"I just make people uncomfortable," he says. "They usually can't even figure out why, but they make enough noise about it that the teachers move 'em anyway."

"Huh. Were there problems about that when you were commanding Phoenix too?"

"Not as much. The commander lives separately."

"I don't mean exactly the same thing, I mean people being all 'he's being Sue at meeeee'," she says.

He shrugs. "And I'm telling you, there wasn't much when I commanded Phoenix, but before that I got some of it from my launch and my army."

"I got some crap but it was mostly because I was being a girl at people," Aegis yawns.

"What's that matter?"

"Doesn't. But we're strange, exotic creatures, you know," she says, waggling her fingers at him while she bounces from wall to wall, "we have cooties, they don't make us cut our hair off, we must be aliens."

Sue giggles.

"People talked for a while about how you reacted when Suicide Watch got shortened."

"Huh?"

"They thought it was weird you'd go by a girls' name."

"It's funny," he says, as though this is the ultimate rationale.

"I just thought it was very like you, to pick a name that someone invented to tease you and adopt it. I'm not sure how it's funny."

"...That is how it's funny," he says, shooting her a puzzled look.

"So you just find your own personality endlessly entertaining, then."

"I guess? Not really? No," he says. "...Well, maybe."

"There is the decisiveness and clear thinking we need in the fight against the buggers, right there," teases Aegis.

He makes a rude gesture in her direction.

She sticks out her tongue and rockets to the other side of the room and back.

Sue launches to catch her in midflight.

She doesn't have to, but she lets him catch her by the hand, and they go tumbling crazily together until they hit a wall, and she laughs.

"I like you too and I'm also glad I'm here, although we'll see what I say about that in a week when I'm really homesick for the birds and everybody - I was in the middle of something with the seahorses, too," she giggles, hugging back.

"Tell me all about 'em!" he says immediately.

"Oh, so the seahorses were aquatic - I got them after the butterflies learned to make glass, I put a fishbowl sort of thing over my avatar's head and carried ballast and it could get around okay underwater, and I found seahorses living in a coral reef, and they had these pests - little jellyfish things, swarms of them, not intelligent at all, I tried to see if maybe they were but they weren't, and they were like mosquitoes to the seahorses. And I tested a bunch of different stuff to see if I could repel them, and I tried finding where they laid their egg packets, and finally I just made a big net and put it around the reef like a fence - with gates in it. And I was in the middle of going around and killing all the jellies and eggs that were still inside the net so this could be a complete solution."

He laughs. "Awesome."

She smiles. "It's really a very clever game. It's a pity they don't have it here. I wonder if they don't need psych data about us anymore, or something."

"Who knows," says Sue. "I miss it too, though."

"Maybe they spy on us to see how we react to its absence," she suggests.

"In your case, with paranoia?" he jokes.

"Oh, it's justified paranoia, did I ever tell you what happened when I quit processing my thoughts in English?" she snickers.

"No, what?"

"It was scarce hours before I was summoned to a meeting about it. Apparently because I didn't take the standard psych tests when I was little and the monitors didn't work on me, they were using my notebooking for a bead on what's in my brain. They couldn't use the game because it was different for me. I wound up writing a report on the game and what I thought it might mean once a week. I have no idea what they did for you. Did you have a monitor?"

"Nope," he says. "Psych tests. And shrinks. Lots and lots of shrinks. I scared most of 'em off, though." He grins proudly.

"Were you just yourself at them, too?" laughs Aegis.

"Yep!" he beams.

"Apparently everyone is allergic to you except a lucky handful. You're like poison ivy."

He cracks up.

"Maybe you should be Ivy instead of Sue. Maybe you should collect a whole bunch of three-letter girls' names and have one for every day of the week," she snorts.

...Well now he's just giggling more.

She laughs and launches into the air again, capering across the bay with fey grace.

Sue watches her, and smiles.